I'm taking a step back from at-home dad analysis today to try to parse a more puzzling (but related) phenomenon. Where the heck are all the male teachers? The nice folks at the National Education Association put out a 300-odd page report on the state of the American teacher. Buried in the report (and in the much more accessible four-page data summary (PDF)) is this startling fact: 21 percent of teachers are men, the lowest (by a long shot) since NEA started collecting the stats 40 years ago.

What gives? Newspapers are rushing to write happy stories about men taking over traditionally female jobs (see this USA Today story and this one from the Cincinnati Enquirer). The number of male nurses has almost triped in the past two decades. The same seems to be true in other fields. And, of course, at-home dad numbers (as best we can we tell) are on the rise.

So there's a mystery here, and I haven't seen a good explanation of why teacher-gender ratios should be widening when they're closing elsewhere. (In fact, in the two stories linked to above, which were written before the NEA report, the authors come to the common-sense conclusions that men must indeed be making strides in the classroom.)

The teacher gender gap is particularly bothersome to me because school is where those first impressions of what men do and what women do begin to get reinforced. And those I don't have time to do more than a cursory, unreliable Google search, it seems that men and women tend to have different teaching styles. And then there's the importance of role modeling. I'd love to propose a solution to this disparity, but I can't even figure out an explanation for what's going on. Can you?